“Paul sat down where Hawat had been, straightened the papers. One more day here, he thought. He looked around the room. We’re leaving. The idea of departure was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been before. He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things—the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns—the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now. And he wondered: What is the now?”
―
Frank Herbert
“Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”
―
Frank Herbert
“A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.”
―
Frank Herbert
“What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?”
―
Frank Herbert
“He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.”
―
Frank Herbert
“A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Now, motivational patterns are going to be similar among all espionage agents. That is to say: there will be certain types of motivation that are similar despite differing schools or opposed aims. You will study first how to separate this element for your analysis—in the beginning, through interrogation patterns that betray the inner orientation of the interrogators; secondly, by close observation of language-thought orientation of those under analysis. You will find it fairly simple to determine the root languages of your subjects, of course, both through voice inflection and speech pattern.”
―
Frank Herbert
“It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Do as she says, you wormfaced, crawling, sand-brained piece of lizard turd!”
―
Frank Herbert
“The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system.”
―
Frank Herbert
“What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people.”
―
Frank Herbert
“If he could smell the pre-spice mass, that meant the gasses deep under the sand were nearing explosive pressure.”
―
Frank Herbert
“I observed you in pain, lad. Pain’s merely the axis of the test. Your mother’s told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation.”
―
Frank Herbert
